Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#131

Post by jbs789 »

Stepping back from the specifics these are stories of human nature.

We tag “complacency” as bad, but I think it’s just a byproduct of our reliance on heuristics and patterns which is evolutionarily useful overall.

On the other hand we worry (sometimes excessively) about how the future might unfold and really much of that is unknown.

Much more practical (and rewarding) to keep improving oneself or organisation to meet the needs of the world today withe an eye on how the world is evolving, rather than try to be some oracle or predict too far out (in which case you need to both get the prediction and the execution right!).

As an aside, it seems a recent fashion to love these big bets these days (AI, remember Metaverse), and to make big high conviction statements about the future, but that’s more to do with their individual specific circumstances and motivations.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#132

Post by mikestaas »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #101
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #88

I don't know if the problems at the company that I worked for, came from the CEO, or many of the powerful General Managers. At my company, "General Manager" positions were the ones that actually set much of the planning priorities. Many of them, eventually got promoted to VP, and even, in the case of my former boss, the Chairman of the Board. When the iPhone came out, one of my employees got one (the first version).…

There was an excellent thread(s? I think) about Nokia around these parts a few months back that covered this in detail by various commentators (perhaps you were one of them). Wish I'd bookmarked them; some great reading in those

This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42724761

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#133

Post by anovikov »

joe_the_user wrote: post #122
mcswell wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence." I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did. So if "most companies are not in the f…

First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did But all 400+ carriage maker had pivoted, would they have had a chance to survive very long? Would they have all made more money pivoting? The idea that all this is only a "lack of vision" rather than hard business choices…

This. Carmaking is not viable on small scale the way carriage making is. If they all pivoted, perhaps 10 instead of 1 would have survived through 1929, the fate of all others would be the same - except staying carriage makers till the end they at least continued to extract profits, trying to all become carmakers they'd waste that money into retooling and retraining and whatnot and never made it back.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#134

Post by Animats »

barrysaunders wrote: post #127

This kind of just-so story is easy to write after the fact. It's harder to see the future at the time. How many people read a version of the same story and pivoted their company to focus on SecondLife, NFTs, blockchain or whatever else technology was hyped at the time and tanked? That's the other half of this story.

Ideas that worked but didn't catch on:

- Virtual worlds / metaverses

You can replicate real life, but it's kind of boring.

- 3D printing

Became a useful industrial tool, but home 3D printing never went mainstream. At one point Office Depot offered 3D printing. No longer.

- Self-driving minibuses

Several startups built these, and some were deployed. Never really caught on. You'd think that airport parking shuttles and such would use these, but they don't.

- Small gas turbines

Power for cars, buses, trucks, backup power, and other things where you need tens to hundreds of kilowatts in a small package. All those things were built and worked. But the technology never became cheap. Aircraft APUs for large aircraft and the US Army's M1 tank variants remain one of the few deployed applications. The frustration of turbine engines is that below bizjet size, smaller units are not much cheaper.

- 3D TV

That got far enough that 3D TV sets were in stores. But they didn't sell.

- Nuclear power

Works, mostly, but isn't really cost-effective. Failures are very expensive and require evacuating sizable areas.

- Proof of correctness for programs

After forty years, it's still a clunky process.

- Maglev trains

Works, but insanely expensive.

- The Segway

Works, but scooters do the same job with less expense.

- 3D input devices

They used to be seen at trade shows, but it turns out that they don't make 3D input easier.

It's quite possible to guess wrong.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#136

Post by musicale »

Animats wrote: post #134
barrysaunders wrote: post #127

This kind of just-so story is easy to write after the fact. It's harder to see the future at the time. How many people read a version of the same story and pivoted their company to focus on SecondLife, NFTs, blockchain or whatever else technology was hyped at the time and tanked? That's the other half of this story.

Ideas that worked but didn't catch on: - Virtual worlds / metaverses You can replicate real life, but it's kind of boring. - 3D printing Became a useful industrial tool, but home 3D printing never went mainstream. At one point Office Depot offered 3D printing. No longer. - Self-driving minibuses Several startups built these, and some were deployed. Never really caught on. You'd think that airport parking shuttles and…

Metaverse (virtual worlds) did catch on - virtual offices and storefronts didn't really catch on, but people enjoy virtual worlds for: competitive and cooperative gaming; virtual fashion and environment construction; chat and social interaction; storytelling; performance; etc. Mostly non-commerce recreation activities. Look at the success of fortnite, minecraft, world of warcraft, etc. These share the dimension of shared recreational experiences and activities that give people a reason to spend time in the virtual world.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#137

Post by myrmidon »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #76
myrmidon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone". To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely: I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably re…

If you asked your cat to make a REST API call I suppose it would fail, but the same applies if you asked a chatbot to predict realtime prey behavior.

I think LLMs are much closer to grasping movement prediction than the cat is to learning english for what its worth.

IMO "ability to communicate" is a somewhat fair proxy for intelligence (even if it does not capture all of an animals capabilities), and current LLMs are clearly superior to any animal in that regard.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#138

Post by yobbo »

The shift described in the article is more about craftsmanship vs mass production (Ford's conveyor belt and so on) and disruption is not the right word as it took place over decades. Most people that started as coach builders could probably keep their jobs as fewer and fewer people started.

There were some classes of combustion engines that smaller shops did manufacture, such as big hot-bulb engines for ships and factories. Miniaturised combustion engines or electric motors are not suitable for craftsman-like building but rather standardised procedures with specialised machines.

The main mechanism is not "disruption" but rather a trend of miniaturisation and mass production.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#139

Post by benhurmarcel »

baxtr wrote: post #50
jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews. So maybe your analysis is outdated?

An Amazon AI chatbot is also the only way to request a refund after you haven't received your packet.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#140

Post by airstrike »

anon7000 wrote: post #30
jayd16 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be true but Bezos' comment is also classic smoke blowing. "Oh well you can't see us using or quantify it's success but it's certainly in everything we do!"

But it’s completely true — Amazon undoubtedly has a pretty advanced logistics set up and certainly uses AI all over the place. Even if they’re not a big AI researcher. There are a lot of great use cases for ML outside of chatbots

It's not "generative AI" which is what most people mean when they say "AI" today, outside of "old school" AI/ML folks.

So at best technically correct on his part but still semantically incorrect

Post reply on HN